Lars Kirchhoff, Thomas Nicolai, Axel Bruns, Tim Highfield

This paper examines the observable patterns of content creation by Australian political bloggers during the 2007 election and its aftermath, thereby providing insight into the level and nature of activity in the Australian political blogosphere during that time. The performance indicators which are identified through this process enable us to target for further indepth research, to be reported in subsequent papers, those individual blogs and blog clusters showing especially high or unusual activity as compared to the overall baseline. This research forms the first stage in a larger project to investigate the shape and internal dynamics of the Australian political blogosphere. In this first stage, we tracked the activities of some 230 political blogs and related Websites in Australia from 2 November 2007 (the final month of the federal election campaign, with the election itself taking place on 24 November) to 24 January 2008. We harvested more than 65,000 articles for this study.